Residents of two Houston-area cities were told to stay indoors and schools in six communities were closed on Thursday due to air pollution by a cancer-causing chemical after a petrochemical plant fire.

Mississippi's Republican governor was due to sign one of America's strictest abortion bills on Thursday banning women from obtaining an abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can often occur before a woman even realizes she is pregnant.

As icy, lethal flood waters fed by rains and melting snow recede in Nebraska and Iowa, leaving destroyed homes, drowned cattle and swamped farmland, Midwest states downstream were set on Thursday for a relentless surge of the Missouri River.

A U.S. judge on Wednesday questioned how the government would be able to properly attend to Central American asylum seekers forced to live in Mexico while their claims are processed, on the same day the government expanded the program to El Paso.

A string of small Missouri towns prepared for the next deluge along the raging Missouri River on Wednesday after flooding wreaked nearly $1.5 billion in damage in Nebraska, killing at least four people and leaving another man missing.

A descendant of an American slave on Wednesday sued Harvard University to gain possession of photos of her great-great-great grandfather that the school commissioned in 1850 on behalf of a professor trying to prove the inferiority of black people.

A U.S. judge has blocked oil drilling planned in Wyoming because the government failed to adequately consider its impact on global warming - a decision that could complicate President Donald Trump's broader efforts to expand oil, gas and coal output on America's public lands.

U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared poised to side with a black Mississippi death row inmate put on trial six times for a 1996 quadruple murder who accused a prosecutor of repeatedly blocking black potential jurors, though the court's only black member sounded skeptical.

The U.S. Department of Defense is proposing to pay for President Donald Trump's much-debated border wall by shifting funds away from projects that include $1.2 billion for schools, childcare centers and other facilities for military children, according to a list it has provided to lawmakers.

State and local investigators have begun probing a petrochemical storage company outside Houston where a massive fire fed by giant tanks of fuel burned for days, darkening the skies with soot for dozens of miles, officials said.